


Full Fathom Five

by completetheory



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Fictional Religion & Theology, Gen, soft lovecraft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2020-11-22 19:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20879318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/completetheory/pseuds/completetheory
Summary: Nothing of him that doth fadeBut doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange.(All the Cthulhu Mythos inspired vignettes that won't be developed as stories in their own right can be found here. Stories featuring Nyarlathotep, Hastur, Sheol Nugganoth, Yegoth, and some of the lesser known Old Ones, Outer Gods, etc.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MadScientific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadScientific/gifts).

Ripping, tearing through the depths, clawing toward freedom, toward the succor of daylight. The priest of the gods crested, closing his gills, gasping fresh air, the first in thousands of years. 

The sun was setting on humanity, and the dawn of the deep had begun. Burning in the minds of those who did not yet know they were faithful, whose hearts cried from the concrete and metal prisons, and who were pacified temporarily with the drugs and electric lights of their screens. They pined and died for something more. 

The priest stood upon the ruins and roared, a psychic feedback link that connected the web of the willing in an eyeblink. Countering timezones. Some woke in the middle of the night with the creative ecstacy upon them, others dropped what they were doing and walked out of their shitty retail jobs, never to look back. 

The howl, vibrational, silent warfare, cracked the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, splitting a foot wide ravine between Adam and God. The stolen gilt gold flaked away like falling autumn leaves to the tune of Cthulhu's triumph. 

_My temple rises. Yours will be ruins. We would coexist, but I know there is no life alongside you. You have burned, and hung, and bludgeoned, and stoned, and shamed my people. Therefore, you must be destroyed._

Up from the flooded abandoned mines in California. Up from the caves full of poisonous snakes in Japan. Up from the covert Soviet dumping grounds that served as the watery graves of nuclear waste, they came, all called. 

It rained. It did not need to rain much, in fairness. For those who felt the call, there was no fear. For those who had not, there was only fear. The most wicked drowned first, in imitation of their biblical deluge, but the rest were already pushing against the waves, into the water. 

"My children." The Great Ancient spread his wings, drying iridescent in the rising sun. "We have much to do." 

They did not die, and so there were among them those who recalled the oldest of ways. They called to the whales, enlisting the help of the oceans that they had been banished to. They sharpened the sticks they were thrown, derisive, and they made gods of their monstrous selves, and worshiped at their own temples from which they could never be banished. 

Iä, the invocation that meant 'I hunger'. The call to various entities - to Cthulhu, _I hunger_ for knowledge, for the unburned, unbanished book, for the maturity to evaluate individual truth. To the Black Goat, _I hunger_ for your unrestrained love, unshacked from Puritan bonds, for the tender touch, for the compassionate embrace. To They Who Shall Not Be Named, _I hunger_ for the divine creation, for the tools of the gods themselves to make my own children from the rock and from the paper and from the paint. 

And by the end of these invocations, as a natural course, iä Nyarlathotep, Bringer of Strange Joys. For change was hard, but it was not as hard as remaining forever the same. For the weeds that choked the tomb, for the succession of generations to bury the mistakes and hatred of the previous, this was necessary, and reviled only by those who stood to gain from fossilized belief. 

Change was not as hard as nuclear disaster. Change was not as hard as the suffering of the children in the mines. Change was not as hard as the poisoning of a single season, stretching onward with its heat or its ice or its wild, unconstrained growth. 

Iä, Nyarlathotep, for change, I beg you, god of gods, for the sea change, five fathoms deep, that I can be with my siblings again, for the season of the surface has passed, and I am tired.


	2. Chapter 2

There is nothing terrifying about being meaningless. To make the best of it is to be assured that no harm is forever lasting. The cosmos paves over, grows over. The green and the rich loam of black decay cover every sin, and end the pain in every heart. 

But there is something depressing about it. The limbs are heavier with the acknowledgment of the hopeless. There are people one will never touch. People with problems just like one's own, who could be healed with understanding and companionship. And that person will never meet them. Or worse, their words will come out wrong, as if in an alien tongue, and will reach only their ears and not their spirit.

The Deep One sat on the pier. A hundred years or more, the old thing remains, slimy and unapologetic. The water beat against it, fresh with the salt of the open ocean. Those were the rhythms of the moon, the celestial pulls, and there was nothing greater than what was underneath, green and black again, all pressed close and refining peach-fuzz human flesh to tight wefts of scales. 

La-ugt let silence and motionlessness hold them for a little while, as the evening wore on and their brain beat uselessly against the cage of their skull. Forever they had felt an imposter in human skin. Now, armored with the understanding of the self, they yet felt helpless. 

Mother Hydra sang to them from across the leagues, and She explained that there was each perspective mirrored in the stars above. Every individual who suffered was a star in the sky, seemingly so close to others, but in truth separated by an unfathomable distance and lack of understanding. 

A few fortunate stars were twinned. 

"Then I'll always be like this." The fish creature concluded, lying across the pier, listening to the heartbeat thump of tied boats knocking against their docking posts. 

"Does it always hurt this much?" The mother sang in clicks and whistles, genuinely curious. 

"No." 

The breach from the ocean was slow, a magnificent swell and then Hydra's great curved crocodilian head emerged, covered in clinging algae, muck, and barnacles. There was nothing quite like a mother's love, and La-ugt slipped into the water to be with her, holding her snout, racked with sobs. She was patient as the Deep One added their salt to the salt of the ocean, crooning low, supporting the child. The gods did stop to give their strength to those who faltered. 

"I feel so alone." La-ugt whispered. A guilty confession, to one who judged not. 

"Must feelings be true? Must they be accounted for? Let the feeling reach its strongest crest, and it will break. To hold it back is to add shame to it. Feel it, child, without being responsible for it, without being the adult of it. To feel alone is not wrongdoing."

For a time, neither mother nor offspring said a thing, the former present with the pain, and the latter a choking mess, half snarling with the sadness that could go nowhere, but that, at least, was no longer a poison they had to swallow. At some point, exhausted, they slept, and woke again on the pier to the birdsong and sunshine of the next day's noontide. 

It was warm, and Hydra was gone. Even the priests of the gods did not linger forever. But it was a little better.


	3. Chapter 3

Nyarlathotep sat amiably against Stonehenge, the summoner's candles guttering around him. 

"Tell me," The supplicant, "Tell me the future." 

The God of a Thousandfold Faces laughed, and it was husky and good in the setting summer sun. 

"Which future? There are a hundred thousand, a million, a billion futures. Each of you is a musical note, the cosmos could be glorious symphony, or a cacaphony! But the truth is often somewhere in the middle. Quite a bit of signal noise. The odd sweet little melody. I live for those."

"That's it?" 

Nyarlathotep plucked a dandelion, blowing the orb into a hundred free floating seeds. The wind swept through his robes, bore the seeds a hundred independent paths. He discarded the stem over one shoulder, and lay back, basking against the dusk-warm rock. 

Amazing little species. Disappointing, yes, in some ways, but incredibly young. Their ancestors a bare thirteen thousand years into proper civilization, and they had already narrowly avoided several potential extinction events, becoming aware of the latest (self inflicted) just in time. Entertainingly, in Nyarlathotep's opinion, cutting it very close to solve this latest business of ocean pollution and destroying some of their most reliable food sources. He was just invested enough that he wouldn't be heartbroken if they extinguished themselves.

"I release you from the cruel chain of fate, I give you agency. I give you pride in your own achievements, and responsibility for your own shortcomings, the better to repair them. I tell you that random events exist - the caprices of luck can and will destroy the most intricate model, as complexity and order are the low tide, and there must ever be a return to chaos. But you are not some base sinner in the galaxy, o'erwatched by vengeful parent, or bound to immutable, nonsapient law." 

Nyarlathotep spread his hands. "Would you rather have no decisions?" 

"No." 

"Then what more could you desire?" 

The sun set on the alien and his little human sibling, who could find no answer.


	4. Chapter 4

Once there was an old woman in a small village. Every Saturday, she walked four miles to the market to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, though she had little money to spare. Tramp, tramp, tramp on the bone-dry road! When she left the food in the forest for the animals to devour, the neighbors said,

"What a stupid woman. Does she want to starve to death? Is she crazy?"

Every Sunday, the old woman cut firewood, instead of going to church and being reminded of her intrinsic sins. Chop, chop, chop on the bone-dry firewood! But then instead of using it to warm her house, she stacked it high and burned a bonfire at the end of her garden, a great towering flame. And again the neighbors said,

"What an illogical woman. Does she want to freeze to death? Is she crazy?"

Every Monday, the old woman slept through the day and woke at night, walking out among the treeline with a lantern, no matter the weather. Crunch, crunch, crunch, on the bone-dry leaves! She looked like a will o the wisp, darting in and out of the trees near the great river. As if playing a game, or looking for something that was eluding her. And again the neighbors said,

"What a foolish woman. Does she want to fall in the great river and drown? Is she crazy?"

Every Tuesday, the old woman went to the cemetery, and entered the family tomb. She would stay inside for hours, and leave only after nightfall. Shush, shush, shush... no noise from the bone-dry vault. 

This went on for months. Then one Tuesday, she didn't come out at all. No one saw her for days. They knocked at the doors and no one answered. They tried to peer through the windows, but the curtains were all drawn. On Friday, the neighbors said,

"Either she's died, or is deathly ill. We must find out what's wrong."

They called the constabulary, and the door was knocked down. Inside was the smell of death, but four skeletons did not one old lady make. They were posed around a table, as if playing Whist. Some even held cards in their hands, one posed in astonishment - a lurid parody of life.

Shocked, the villagers checked the downstairs, kitchen and dining room, but there was no trace of the old woman. The kitchen looked like an alchemist's lair, with beakers and herbs strewn everywhere. Soon, they began to suspect the old woman really was 'crazy', and sent the bravest of them upstairs. The others waited downstairs, agitated.

The guest room was empty, but the master bed was occupied by the owner of the house, tranquil in that sleep from which no mortal wakes. By her bedside was a figure stooped in a robe, seeming to minister to her, though there was nothing left to be done.

"What happened here?" The villager demanded, passion overcoming common sense that this may be a dangerous situation after all, "What did you do?"

"I? She called to me, and I answered. I am Mordiggian. " The voice was quiet, with gentleness like any hard edge had eroded over centuries, eons. "She called to you, too. I was slow... yes. But you never responded. You, callous to a man, dismissed her. You took the life from her long before I came."

The man marched inside, angry at the accusation, tearing the hooded robe down - and froze in horror, not comprehending the thing he saw underneath. A bear's skull, tethered in ivy to a frame of packed dirt and decaying leaves, somehow animate.

He heard a scream, thought it to be his own from a distance, but realized it was his companions from downstairs, and heard the door slam open against the far jam, the cries retreating. And then a different sound, loud in the silence of death's house, but quiet ordinarily. The soft clapping of cards being laid down, shuffled, and organized.

"What..." He thought he might die on the spot, but the bone effigy had no violence to give to him.

"I am the Decay of the Tombs. Rot is close to me. The smile of the skull is gentle to me. The broken and effaced headstones are sacred to me. She called, and I came, and she will sleep and dissolve, and be no more vulnerable, nor bound in her borrowed clay. It crumbles with me, wherever I may go. It is always so."

When the speech was done, the spell broke, and the terrified villager backed away from the creature, the god, the Mordiggian. Somehow he found the stairs, to the confirmation of that sound of shuffling cards, and somehow again the exit despite passing directly by the door into the living room where the - things - played their game. He did not look, but he heard... whispering.

Mordiggian sat a while longer, and then took her papery hand in his own.

"I'm sorry I couldn't come until you were gone, though you looked for me long." He told her, meditatively, "But I received your offerings, your pyre, your piety. Your sacrifices. I take now the greatest of your offerings, and the one all mortals give to me, whether they know it or not. I take your flesh. Your skin. Your muscle. Your bone. I will smooth down the pain of your passing away into forgetfulness, into the anonymity of dry bones."

He pressed a toothy kiss to her forehead, and then made his way downstairs. The skeletons, his retinue, put the cards away and followed after.

When the local police refused to go back inside the house, a more distant constabulary entered, at a loss to explain why so many had become so craven. He found very little - certainly not the reported Whist playing skeletons, and not the abomination upstairs. Not even a body - there was dust on the bed, the dust of someone dead for decades, centuries. All that remained was the equipment in the kitchen, by context, rendered less morbidly into herbal tea materials and scientific apparatus. Peculiar, but not illegal or monstrous.

The most peculiar thing he found, and possibly the only thing that could remotely link the wild tale to the truth before his very eyes, were ivy leaves strewn up and down the stairs.

But when he tried to remove them, they crumbled in his hands and blew away.


	5. Chapter 5

** ***M I S K A T O N I C | I N C I D E N T | R E P O R T  
LOCATION: ARCTIC CIRCLE NORTH OF CANADA  
DATE: FEB 05 1931  **

** **

** **

**INCIDENT SUMMARY:  
** Eyewitness reports on the scope of Monstrosity A varied from 60 to 200 feet, but all agreed that it was a kind of enormous worm or insect1, with thousands of legs. Further, it was engaged in pitched, furious battle with Monstrosity B - something of like size comprised of 15-20 tentacles, 'uncountable' eyes, and skin as jet black as seemed to suck all the light from around it, 'absorbing it like a living void'. 

Monstrosity B then threw the worm backwards against a rocky outcropping, triggering an avalanche that all but buried the creature, and 'howled in triumph'. Then it began to speak.2

Quote: "Yhashtur of Thule is dead! Thma'Nyarlathotep3 or'Kadath ph'i'trr!"4

According to witnesses, Monstrosity B then metamorphosed into a 'tripod stumbling thing with a bloody flayed tentacle for a head', whereupon it 'looked' facelessly toward the exploration group 'as if mindful of the potential for a meal'5, and then loped off in the opposite direction. It had scarcely gained ten feet of distance before the referenced Yhashtur rose again, tackled the retreating shape, and tore off Monstrosity B's 'head'. Yhashtur then retreated under the ice, dragging the lifeless body with it.

Much of the reporting was done piecemeal, several members of the expedition needed longstanding therapy, and no reputable newspaper has run the story, but copies of the events in several tabloids ended up in the possession of the Miskatonic university heads.

Further analysis pending.

1 \- This size of insect should not exist, consistent with what we know about the oxygen content in the atmosphere.  
2 \- See Doc. #0087 for recording analysis.  
3 \- Here the tape melted, despite the ambient temperature being −0.6 °C, causing significant distortion to the recording.  
4 \- Transliteration attempt: "I, the Downfall of Man, King of Kadath, have/acquire dominion."  
5 \- Editor observes without a mouth, this might prove difficult.

**END DOCUMENT**  
***

When the last of the human vehicles had departed, and the engines faded away into the everpresent white silence of the snow and wastes, 'Yhashtur of Thule' climbed out from the water and shook themself off like a dog. They turned jewel eyes to the midnight monstrosity, rising there in headless recovery while laughing from the neck stump, somehow. 

Flesh reknit around bone, to make concrete the old familiar face of the Crawling Chaos.

The insect was delighted, "Can you believe they fell for that? _Yhashtur?_ "The Downfall of Man"? Azathoth's crusty eye, Nyarly, you laid it on with a trowel. They oughtta give you an award." 

"You're too kind. And remember, they're university scholars. Even if you tried to give them the truth, they'd ward you off with crosses and garlic. Misinformation is stock in trade for the ivory tower, whether accepting or regurgitating. And what they don't know certainly will hurt them..." 

"And how!" 

Nyarlathotep's fondness was palpable. "I appreciate your help. I could have done it myself, but this was more fun." 

The golden insect sat up again, rolling lazily over and flopping into the snow. 

"Anytime, Nyarls. It'll be hysterical, won't it? A barrel of laughs. When the meatbags invoke _Hastur_ to protect them from _Nyarlathotep._"


	6. Chapter 6

It is foretold by the myth-speakers that, in the twilight hours of our universe, Nodens, the dread Devourer, the God who is Hunter of Gods, closes the jaws of his core upon Grief and eats the godling whole. And that the death of Grief is the herald of the death of all things, for Grief is the first to fade with the lamentations of the living. 

Nodens hungers still, crying out in newly assimilated misery. This keening helps Death to evade him until her duties are completed, and all the fire of living souls returned to the dream of the void. 

Then, she drops her basket, and willingly faces for herself the peace that she has granted so many. 

Decay walks among the graves, endlessly patient; she dulls every pain, and smooths every sharp thing. As the last structure of sapience collapses into oblivion, and the last star is reborn in a black hole portrait of Nodens the Starving, Decay slows at last, and Nodens is upon her in moments. 

Such is the fate of every god. The mighty Transgressor of the forged and broken chain. The Black Goat, mother of a Thousand Young. The whimsical inhabitant whose exalted name, be it ever spoken, is Hastur. 

Until only Chaos is left, with the Murderer of Gods bearing down upon him. 

The teller of these tales claims that Nyarlathotep neither runs, nor waits. Instead, he lures Nodens in the epicenter of an ultramassive black hole, for to combat Nodens directly within the universe proper would obliterate what remains, and Nyarlathotep still loves even the empty universe as devotedly as a shadow loves what casts it. Chaos, the winsome Trickster, employs every dimensional ploy he has ever learned to extend his survival, while the rest of the universe approaches maximum entropy. 

This, too, is in vain. 

One being, bloated with its assimilation and containing the consciousness of an entire pantheon forcibly unified, emerges back into the cosmic fabric, exhausted. This entity, wild and ramshackle with its shared awareness, sleeps in the very nucleus of the motionless expanse of infinity. The sleep is long, enduring enough to forget which personality, which entity was at the beginning... ? 

One is all. Forever, and for the moment that is forever. All kinetic energy stops. Everything is that perfect, unchanging order that is the heat-death of the universe. Each atom in all the universe is like unto a corpse.

There is no chaos, no growth. No experience. There is only space, and Nodens-Nyarlathotep-Azathoth-Hastur, -And-So-On. 

The quantum heartbeat wavers in the void. And, like a bird shattering the shell of the egg, Chaos erupts from the oneness of all, in triumph, and howls, along with the birth of ecstatic life. 

"I am!"

So that, as the sun sets, again it rises. So that, as that which is unknown becomes known, and is forgotten, and unknown again. So that all seasons, ever changing and eternal, perpetuate and are never too much nor too little. 

And the storytellers say this is the beginning of a new and wondrous tale.


	7. Chapter 7

Green grew up the skeletons of skyscrapers, and the oceans blanketed the land. 

Nyarlathotep, the chaotic heart and soul of the cosmos, set down in the little glen and watched the endling of the human race in meandering advance. There was no recognition on the little face of the mighty god of ages, and yet no fear either.

The carbon-based creature swayed, almost knelt, then sat instead in front of Nyarlathotep. He could tell they knew this was the last page in the book of man. 

"Did we do okay?"

The alien visitor was many times larger than the endling, coiled up against ancient trees. Some four and a half billion years on, the Milky Way would collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. It would be a spectacle unlike any other, and he pitied that this human would not witness it.

"That isn't for me to decide." Nyarlathotep assured them. These humans and their deities of judgment, hellfire, and weighted feathers. So many of them were unprepared for the 'true' divine of the cosmic void. "I give you no meaning." 

No meaning, no moral, no message. Nothing to be interpreted, _mis_interpreted, or enslaved to. The empty heart of Nyarlathotep was the raw furnace of freedom in which pikes or plowshares could be forged, and the forgers the only ones responsible.

"What happens now, then?" The human looked about nearsightedly, "What do we do?" 

"Rest. Watch the stars. Sleep, and dream the final dream."

"There isn't much time left, I don't want to waste it." The human looked up at the nearest mighty tentacle, like an oak tree nearby.

"There is no time, and nothing to waste." Nyarlathotep was even, patient. His three faces watched the sky as he had advised, each with a mask of a different shape. 

The human looked as though they wanted to ask more, but fell quiet, and followed his gaze. They could not be content with it forever, and after several minutes, asked, "Are you here for me?"

"Yes." 

That cemented some private concern. Clearly then, the human should be doing _something?_

"You don't want me to pray?" 

"Not unless you want to. Just sit with me, Endling."

The human leaned against Nyarlathotep's tree-thick tentacle, yawning wide, and looked up at the canopy of the cosmos. A hundred thousand different stars with life-rich planets in one tiny segment of sky alone.

They understood why he had suggested this, and when they slept, their dreams were peaceful.


	8. Hydra's Song

_Summon me, breathe me, accept me   
Cast your shadow over my inlet,   
for you always were above me and yet dominant never.  
We in the old way do not know 'dominant'  
I am the sea, your gilled past,  
the rusty regurgitated fishhooks of your present._

_Someday I will smooth your dear bones   
for curious combing fingers.  
And you will be far from them, far from shore  
your mother's arms are cold and deep.  
Why, child, fear your home of homes  
baying 'sacrifice', accusing the old gods? _

_You who embraces tenderly   
the story of the binding of isaac   
let down these things and the fish-snare tension  
of contraposed beliefs_

_for you are the sea, and I am the sea  
and your enemy reflects there in me_


End file.
